Whereas great strides have been made in the security of public networks, there is one totally neglected aspect: public scrutiny. In a public network, the procedure for creating a private, secure channel within the public architecture is well defined. The procedure involves the provision of trust brokered between two unique parties by a trusted third party. The technologies and methods for provision of this trust rely exclusively on the mathematic formulation of exchanged information. While these methods are currently viewed as being difficult with which to interfere, the concept of being able to publicly check on the provision of the information is completely lacking.
There is no easy, public way to “check the badge number” of the electronic “police officer” showing it to you. There is no way to scrutinize the trusted third party provider of the electronic exchange information or scrutinize the conditions under which they became a provider. In essence, there is no easy publicly verifiable method or technology that can be used in real-time to verify and validate the mathematic information presentation to be certain that the security and privacy of the connection is as created.
The present invention is therefore directed to the problem of developing a method and apparatus for communicating securely over a public network that does not rely on self-authentication of a trusted third party.